A Maine Coon Cat in Australia May Be the World's Longest Feline

BY Kirstin Fawcett

May 17, 2017

iStock

Meet Omar, a fluffy Maine Coon who lives in Melbourne, Australia. Until recently, Omar was just an ordinary—albeit massive—domestic feline who enjoyed eating raw kangaroo meat, lounging around his house, and cuddling with his owner, Stephanie Hirst. Now, he’s in the running to receive a Guinness World Record for being the world's longest domestic cat.

As The Telegraph reports, Omar weighs nearly 31 pounds, and is nearly 4 feet long. (To put this fact into perspective, most cats weigh anywhere from 8 to 10 pounds, and Maine Coons—known as one of the largest cat breeds—typically tip the scales anywhere from 9 to 18 pounds.) In early May, Hirst created an Instagram account for Omar, and the giant kitty became an overnight social media sensation when the popular Cats of Instagram account shared one of her posts.

Omar quickly racked up thousands of Instagram followers, and Guinness World Records contacted Hirst to inform her that her pet may be the world’s longest cat. Hirst and her partner, Rowan Lawrence, had already suspected that Omar wasn’t your average Maine Coon: "We thought he might be (the longest cat in the world) but we hadn't done anything about it because he might not be fully grown yet," Hirst told The Herald Sun.

Hirst broke out the tape measure, and noted that her pet is about an inch longer than the current record holder, a Maine Coon named Ludo. Ludo lives in the UK, and is about 46 inches long. In comparison, Omar is about 47 inches long.

Hirst plans to submit Omar’s measurements to Guinness for verification, but she’s sure he’s a shoo-in for a world record. Even if the Australian kitty does end up dethroning Ludo, he’s still not the longest domestic cat ever: That honor goes to Mymains Stewart Gilligan, or “Stewie,” a now-deceased Maine Coon who was over 4 feet from nose to tail.

Members of the United Kingdom’s Parliament want a cat, but not just for office cuddles: As The Telegraph reports, the Palace of Westminster—the meeting place of Parliament’s two houses, the House of Commons and the House of Lords—is overrun with vermin, and officials have had enough. They think an in-house feline would keep the rodents at bay and defray skyrocketing pest control costs.

Taxpayers in the UK recently had to bear the brunt of a $167,000 pest control bill after palace maintenance projects and office renovations disturbed mice and moths from their slumber. The bill—which was nearly one-third higher than the previous year’s—covered the cost of a full-time pest control technician and 1700 bait stations. That said, some Members of Parliament (MPs) think their problem could be solved the old-fashioned way: by deploying a talented mouser.

MP Penny Mordaunt tried taking matters into her own hands by bringing four cats—including her own pet kitty, Titania—to work. (“A great believer in credible deterrence, I’m applying the principle to the lower ministerial corridor mouse problem,” she tweeted.) This solution didn’t last long, however, as health and safety officials banned the cats from Parliament.

While cats aren’t allowed in Parliament, other government offices reportedly have in-house felines. And now, MPs—who are sick of mice getting into their food, running across desks, and scurrying around in the tearoom—are petitioning for the same luxury.

"This is so UNFAIR,” MP Stella Creasy said recently, according to The Telegraph. “When does Parliament get its own cats? We’ve got loads of mice (and some rats!) after all!" Plus, Creasy points out, a cat in Parliament is “YouTube gold in waiting!"

Animal charity Battersea Dogs & Cats Home wants to help, and says it’s been trying to convince Parliament to adopt a cat since 2014. "Battersea has over 130 years [experience] in re-homing rescue cats, and was the first choice for Downing Street, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and the Cabinet Office when they sought our mousers to help with their own rogue rodents,” charity head Lindsey Quinlan said in a statement quoted by The Telegraph. “We'd be more than happy to help the Houses of Parliament recruit their own chief mousers to eliminate their pest problem and restore order in the historic corridors of power."

As of now, only assistance and security dogs are allowed on palace premises—but considering that MPs spotted 217 mice alone in the first six months of 2017 alone, top brass may have to reconsider their rules and give elected officials purr-mission to get their own feline office companions.

Science is a self-correcting process, ever in flux. Accepted hypotheses are overturned in the face of new information. The world isn’t flat after all. Disease isn’t caused by demons or wickedness. And that Hunter Island penguin? Yeah, apparently that was just a figment of our imaginations. Researchers writing in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society say the remains of one supposed species are in fact a “jumbled mixture” of bones from three extant species.

The bones were unearthed in the 1980s during the excavation of a prehistoric trash heap on Tasmania’s Hunter Island. Two scientists named Tets and O’Connor argued that the remains were different enough from other penguins to constitute their own genus and species, one which must have died out during the Holocene epoch. The proud potential penguin parents dubbed the apparently extinct bird Tasidyptes hunterivan, and that was that.

Except that this is science, where no story is ever really over. Other biologists were not satisfied with the evidence Tets and O’Connor presented. There were only four bones, and they all bore some resemblance to species that exist today. Fortunately, in 2017, we’ve got ways of making fossils talk. A research team led by Tess Cole of the University of Otago used DNA barcoding to examine the genetic code of each of the four bones.

“It was a fun and unexpected story,” Cole said in a statement, “because we show that Tasmania’s ‘extinct' penguin is not actually an extinct or unique penguin at all.”

The bones were “a jumbled mixture of three living penguin species, from two genera": the Fiordland crested penguin or Tawaki (Eudyptes pachyrhynchus) and the Snares crested penguin (Eudyptes robustus), both of New Zealand, and the Australian little fairy penguin (Eudyptula novaehollandiae).

“This study shows how useful ancient DNA testing can be,” Cole said. “Not only does it help us identify new but extinct species, but it can help us rule out previously postulated species which did not exist, as in this case.”